All users will follow a step-by-step IT development law, which is consistent with the law of their own business development. After years of construction and improvement, the role of IT systems in business development has become increasingly significant. At the same time, a large number of storage products have gradually accumulated in the user's computer room or the rented IDC computer room. Each system needs RAID and has different manufacturers, models, configurations and performance.

This IT situation determines that administrators must face various storage products with different characteristics when conducting system management, and their utilization, performance, and so on vary. How to comprehensively utilize these devices, improve utilization efficiency and comprehensive performance is the top priority for management personnel. At the same time, administrators are generally unable to fully grasp the product management techniques of various manufacturers, and there is a greater demand for management difficulty and human resources. Therefore, IT managers in enterprises often face enormous IT costs and management pressure.

Storage virtualization is a technology that runs through the entire IT environment and is used to simplify potentially complex underlying infrastructure. The idea of storage virtualization is to separate the logical image of resources from physical storage, providing a simplified and seamless virtual view of resources for systems and administrators.

Consolidating and virtualizing numerous storage devices can greatly reduce the complexity of IT systems, consolidate a large number of small devices into a larger virtual storage pool, enable users to manage storage resources in the entire IT environment through a unified view, reduce maintenance costs, and improve device utilization. Users can benefit from:

Reduce the number of storage devices, reduce the demand for new storage space in IT systems through comprehensive utilization of space, and reduce the cost of ownership in data centers;

To achieve comprehensive utilization of resources and improve storage resource utilization and performance. By storing data on different storage devices, the actual performance of each physical device can be effectively utilized to achieve load sharing;

Reduce management difficulty by using fewer management personnel to manage more devices and systems;

Beneficial for further disaster recovery or rapid recovery in disaster situations.

This solution is suitable for a wide range of users, including large and medium-sized users who have a large number of storage devices but uneven utilization, high management difficulty, and high dependence on IT systems.

Solution composition:

The server consolidation and virtualization solution consists of the following components:

(1) Virtualization storage hardware products: When conducting storage virtualization projects, it is necessary to form an effective virtualization layer between the user's existing storage system and servers. The virtualization layer is generally implemented through a combination of software and hardware. Therefore, it is necessary to configure appropriate virtualization hardware products. Such as Sun ST9985v, IBM, SVC, etc;

(2) Storage virtualization software: Storage virtualization software runs on a hardware platform and consolidates existing storage systems through virtualization software to form virtual storage space available for front-end servers. These software are generally sold together with virtualization hardware products such as Sun, IBM, etc. There are also products sold separately, such as Symantec;

(3) Management software: After the construction of a storage virtualization system, the current management method has also changed, shifting from targeting each physical storage device to comprehensive management of storage resources, requiring the configuration of appropriate storage management software. Generally speaking, management software should be accompanied by the use of virtualization product manufacturers' own products.